The collapse in IPv4 transfer prices is what caught my eye here, dropping from a ~$55 peak in 2021 to a mean of $22 in early 2026 (figure 12).
This validates my hypothesis that the run-up in 2020–2022 was an artificial scarcity bubble driven largely by hyperscalers. AWS was right up there stockpiling before they shifted their pricing model. Once AWS introduced the hourly charge for public IPv4 addresses (effectively passing the scarcity cost to the consumer), their acquisition pressure vanished. The text notes Amazon stopped announcing almost 15M addresses in Nov 2025. I think they have moved from aggressive accumulation to inventory management.
We are seeing asset stranding in real-time. The market has realized that between the AWS tax and the efficacy of mobile CGNAT, the desperate thirst for public v4 space was not infinite. I'm curious to hear more takes on this.
"As the Internet continues to evolve, it is no longer the technically innovative challenger pitted against venerable incumbents in the forms of the traditional industries of telephony, print newspapers, television entertainment and social interaction. The Internet is now the established norm. The days when the Internet was touted as a poster child of disruption in a deregulated space are long since over, and these days we appear to be increasingly looking further afield for a regulatory and governance framework that can challenge the increasing complacency of the very small number of massive digital incumbents.
It is unclear how successful we will be in this search for responses to this oppressive level of centrality in many aspects of the digital environment. We can but wait and see."
I pay close attention to IPv4 addresses for outgoing emails. At work we use several email services and pay for a dedicated IP(v4) at each. And when we provision a new service, we expect our new IP address to be “clean,” by which I mean it is ideally not found on any email reputation list.
For websites and services I don’t care. Some hosting platforms publish via CNAME, and some via A and AAAA records. Most seem to use a mix of v4 and v6 addressing.
The falling price of IPv4 addresses looks to me like we’ve made it to other side of the IPv6 rollout: demand for IPv4 is falling faster than supply now. Not clear if those prices are adjusted for inflation; the post-COVID spike looks like a lot of other nominal price graphs. If not, then the recent price drop is even more dramatic than it appears.
Perhaps in the long run, IPv4 becomes an artisanal choice for uses that depend on stable IP reputation: email sending, primarily. And everyone else relies on TLS for reputation signals, not caring about the IP address.
There is a growing grey market for IPv4 still, though, and probably always will be. It seemed like people were treating them like crypto for a while. Still people out there trying to re-route old abandoned ranges. There are still a lot of legacy ranges that belong to defunct organizations and never got properly sold.
The real story here is China and India have been quietly buying up gobs of African IP blocks - most of which are used for botting operations. I see it in my server logs.
China already de-facto owns half of Africa so it's natural they would prey on their scarce IP resources as well.
When you see AI scraping at a massive scale originating from $AFRICAN_COUNTRY IP space, and that country's GDP is smaller than Rhode Island, you sure as shit know someone else is behind it.
I see this often that people refer to countries as actors. Are you implying that the government of these countries bought those resources and they're now owned by the government? Or are you saying that citizens/corporations of those countries are buying? I find it weird, I wouldn't use the phrase "The United States is buying XYZ" unless it was the current government doing so?
It seems to be widly accepted that the Chinese State (don't know about India) often imposes on or sponsers citizens to perform actions it finds adventagious.
And, I'd say, the US is known to do this. I'll lead with 'Project Azorian' to back it up.
India does it too. You see it on all socials as well as reddit. Brain dead posts and comments praising the current govt or gate against anyone criticising.
Almost all the Indian subreddits are against the current government. You will be banned from a subreddit even if you rightly speak in support of current government on Reddit.
It's hard to take your rest of your comment seriously if you are blatantly dishonest about this.
In the US, the government can apply pressure and bargain with companies for favor, but there is no legal requirement of companies agreeing (shy of court orders). Far more than cases of corporate compliance with the government are cases of corporate defiance.
In China, there is no meaningful difference between the party and any Chinese company. Companies are seed funded by the state and carry the will of the state. There is no "come back with a court order" in China. And even if there was, the courts are also just another arm of the party.
Just yesterday--and I don't know how I wound up there--I looked at RFC1166 (from 1990) which is "a status report on the network numbers and autonomous system numbers used in the Internet community." There's a long list of companies and individuals who were assigned "internet numbers". To my surprise, my real name is listed there! I have no clue why.
Not to spoil the article (but there's a lot in there) but I was particularly intrigued by the ongoing tumbling of the price of IPs. After peaking in 2022, "these days the low price of $9 per address is back to the same price that was seen in 2014."
I was also surprised to find that out the other day when someone on Reddit was complaining they couldn’t get a good price on a /17 they were hoarding to sell for a profit. Good riddance.
It always sends me to sleep when IP enthusiasts lament the lack of adoption for IPv6.
It's obvious to anyone that looks at the two formats that any kind of hacky workaround like NAT gateways will be preferable indefinitely to actually adopting the monstrosity that is IPv6.
That looks weird. I am guessing that someone knows about the mismatch between ccTLDs (where the UK is .uk) and ISO codes (where the UK is GB and Ukraine is UA) and tried to correct something and got it wrong.
Really need governments to start pushing harder on IPv6 adoption. We need sticks, not just carrots. My favorite is chaos engineering forced IPv4 downtime.
I am on zen which you can consider to be as vertical tab mode in FF as well (considering zen is based on FF) (but all be it, I love how slick zen looks! Zen is amazing)
And I have the same texture too! I hadn't observed it until your message
Different RIRs & LIRs have different policies, but the "foolproof" way is to just set up an LLC and register resources through that. There are usually renewal fees as well. If you're not hoping to be able to sell them after you get them, a careful reading of RIR policies can usually net you one or two /24s without needing to buy any blocks.
In either case, if you end up with internet resources you can trawl through sites like https://bgp.services/ to find a cheap VPS provider near you that supports peering. I run my own AS and advertise 3 network blocks (2 IPv4 + 1 IPv6) out of 2 different DCs for several hundred $ per year all in all (including renewal fees, VPS, taxes, etc).
This validates my hypothesis that the run-up in 2020–2022 was an artificial scarcity bubble driven largely by hyperscalers. AWS was right up there stockpiling before they shifted their pricing model. Once AWS introduced the hourly charge for public IPv4 addresses (effectively passing the scarcity cost to the consumer), their acquisition pressure vanished. The text notes Amazon stopped announcing almost 15M addresses in Nov 2025. I think they have moved from aggressive accumulation to inventory management.
We are seeing asset stranding in real-time. The market has realized that between the AWS tax and the efficacy of mobile CGNAT, the desperate thirst for public v4 space was not infinite. I'm curious to hear more takes on this.
For websites and services I don’t care. Some hosting platforms publish via CNAME, and some via A and AAAA records. Most seem to use a mix of v4 and v6 addressing.
The falling price of IPv4 addresses looks to me like we’ve made it to other side of the IPv6 rollout: demand for IPv4 is falling faster than supply now. Not clear if those prices are adjusted for inflation; the post-COVID spike looks like a lot of other nominal price graphs. If not, then the recent price drop is even more dramatic than it appears.
Perhaps in the long run, IPv4 becomes an artisanal choice for uses that depend on stable IP reputation: email sending, primarily. And everyone else relies on TLS for reputation signals, not caring about the IP address.
China already de-facto owns half of Africa so it's natural they would prey on their scarce IP resources as well.
When you see AI scraping at a massive scale originating from $AFRICAN_COUNTRY IP space, and that country's GDP is smaller than Rhode Island, you sure as shit know someone else is behind it.
In the case of China, I believe it's government or CCP-controlled entities, and the end-game is something more nefarious.
For India, IMO it's private industry. They're just trying to make a buck.
And, I'd say, the US is known to do this. I'll lead with 'Project Azorian' to back it up.
Almost all the Indian subreddits are against the current government. You will be banned from a subreddit even if you rightly speak in support of current government on Reddit.
It's hard to take your rest of your comment seriously if you are blatantly dishonest about this.
In China, there is no meaningful difference between the party and any Chinese company. Companies are seed funded by the state and carry the will of the state. There is no "come back with a court order" in China. And even if there was, the courts are also just another arm of the party.
[0]: `<meta content="initial-scale=1,width=device-width" name="viewport">`
It's obvious to anyone that looks at the two formats that any kind of hacky workaround like NAT gateways will be preferable indefinitely to actually adopting the monstrosity that is IPv6.
its correct in other tables.
And I have the same texture too! I hadn't observed it until your message
I have it both under Firefox or Chromium, and whether my tabs are vertical or not. It's just the website's background.
In either case, if you end up with internet resources you can trawl through sites like https://bgp.services/ to find a cheap VPS provider near you that supports peering. I run my own AS and advertise 3 network blocks (2 IPv4 + 1 IPv6) out of 2 different DCs for several hundred $ per year all in all (including renewal fees, VPS, taxes, etc).